The Tribune

By Morgan Adderley

Tribune Staff Reporter

madderley@tribunemedia.net

A BRITISH man whose wife vanished at sea in waters near Cay Sal two years ago was yesterday given a maximum sentence of eight years by a Miami federal judge after previously pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter.

Lewis Bennett, 41, was also ordered to pay about $23,000 in restitution to the couple’s two-year-old daughter and to give up any claim to their $160,000 Florida home.

At the conclusion of his prison term, Bennett will spend three years on supervised release. He has already been serving a seven-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to transporting stolen silver and gold coins worth thousands of dollars.

According to the Miami Herald, Bennett wanted seven years in prison, but US District Judge Federico Moreno said “he could not legally go lower under the circumstances of Isabella Hellmann’s death”.

Bennet, a mining engineer with British and Australian dual citizenship, had only been married to Hellman, 42, a South Florida real estate agent, for three months at the time of the May 2017 incident.

For their honeymoon, the couple were sailing on a 37-foot catamaran throughout the Caribbean.

Bennett had claimed the ship struck an unknown object while he was asleep, adding that he awoke to discover his wife missing and the catamaran taking on water.

When rescued by the United States Coast Guard on May 15, 2017, authorities noticed that Bennett loaded a suitcase and two backpacks on to his raft but had taken only one backpack with him when he was pulled from the raft by the Coast Guard swimmer.

The Coast Guard later recovered the life raft and took it to Key West.

Reports of the incident noted that Bennett was recovered with a suitcase, a backpack, unexpended parachute flares, buoys, 14 gallons of water, a second emergency position indicating radio beacon homing device, and nine plastic tubes which were found to contain some 225 of the stolen coins.

A four-day search to locate Hellman was called off on May 18, 2017. Her body was never recovered.

According to international reports, a sworn document signed by Bennett and filed in court says that he could not recall whether he called out for his wife. He did not deploy any flares and did not search for her in the water with either the catamaran or an attached dinghy.

An FBI inspection later revealed the boat had been deliberately scuttled — holes had been made from the inside of both hulls.

Bennett was originally charged with second-degree murder but made a deal with prosecutors for the lesser manslaughter charge.

At the hearing, Moreno said murder would have been difficult to prove, with no body and no witnesses.